My Blood's True Color
by lacerta-ignis
Summary: Hermione's dreams lead her to find out too much and change her. OOTP SPOILERS. Please Read and Review, and I know that I suck at summeries.
1. Through the Mirror

My Blood's True Color  
  
Chapter One ~ Remembering Through The Mirror  
  
* "WE'VE GOT HIM!" yelled the Death Eater nearest to Harry, "IN AN OFFICE OFF-" "Silencio!" cried Hermione, and the man's voice was extinguished. He continued to mouth through the hole in his mask, but no sound came out; he was thrust aside by his fellow.  
"Petrificus Totalus!" shouted Harry, as the second Death Eater raised his wand. His arms and legs snapped together and he fell forward, facedown onto the rug at Harry's feet, stiff as a board and unable to move at all.  
"Well done Ha-"  
But the Death Eater Hermione had just struck dumb made a sudden slashing motion with his wand from which flew a streak of what looked like a purple flame. It passed right across Hermione's chest; she gave a tiny "oh!" as though of surprise and then crumpled onto the floor where she lay motionless.  
"HERMIONE!" *  
  
The girl who had fallen woke suddenly from the nightmare, now in the relative safety of her bed. Still breathing hard, she pushed her bushy, brown hair out of her face. 'Why did I have to dream of that now? It's been over for a few weeks now.' Sighing, she got out of bed. "Hermione, you're a mess." she muttered to herself. Looking at her clock, she groaned (2:30 AM), and stumbled across the room to her bathroom. Ever since that night at the Ministry of Magic, Hermione had been plagued by these dreams. All of them depicting what had happened at the Ministry. She knew that if she was having these dreams, that Harry must be having them as well, and that his would be worse. Hermione felt that she was being selfish, and this depressed her. She was avoiding everyone after the term had ended. Not that anyone could be contacted anyway. Feeling worse and worse, the days slipped by, and the nights brought with them the torture and pain of the memories at the Ministry. Hermione looked in her mirror. There were bags under her eyes, her hair was in worse condition, and she had the look of someone that never slept. Hermione's parents had questioned at first, but she managed to put up a mask, and tell them that it was fine, that she just hadn't been sleeping well. That didn't mean that they weren't still worried though. Hermione could tell that they suspected something, and in her view, they were right. A glint shone from the corner of her eye. The broken metal shone out against the mirror, it's jagged edges catching the light in an entrancing way. The small shadow it cast upon the sink becoming part of the design. Hermione ran her finger over the edge gently, before bringing her wrist up to it. She sighed as she felt the warming liquid fall over her wrist. She marveled at the way it painted lines on the drain. Then she remembered how tired she was. "Scourigify" she muttered once the bleeding stopped, and her blood disappeared once again from the sink and mirror edge. Finally relaxed, Hermione shuffled back to her bed and fell asleep once again. 


	2. Authors Note

Sorry for the Authors Note, but I forgot I ran all of my chapters that I had written so far together, so I'm pretty annoyed. I also forgot to put a disclaimer on, so here it is: Disclaimer: I DO NOT own Harry Potter, or any of the characters in it. I just own the plot, and that's a pretty sad thing too. Also, all work by J.K. Rowling, aka excerpts from The Order of the Phoenix, have this before and after them: *. All of them are flashback dreams, and the ones with ~ before and after them are dreams that I made up. Now, PLEASE REVIEW!!!!!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!!!! I WANT TO KNOW WHETHER OR NOT TO CONTINUE THIS!!!!! Oh, and this is the only disclaimer I'll post, for all of the chapters. 


	3. BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!

My Blood's True Color  
  
Chapter Two ~ #@$&%*  
  
* "Come out, come out, little Harry!" she called in her mock-baby voice, which echoed off the polished wooden floors. "What did you come after me for, then? I thought you were here to avenge my dear cousin!"  
"I am!" shouted Harry, and a score of ghostly Harry's seemed to chorus I am! I am! I am! all around the room.  
"Aaaaaah . . . did you love him, little baby Potter?"  
Such hatred rose in Harry such as he'd never known before. He flung himself out from behind the fountain and bellowed "Crucio!"  
Bellatrix screamed. The spell had knocked her off her feet, but she did not writhe and shriek with pain as Neville had- she was already on her feet again, breathless, but no longer laughing. Harry dodged behind the golden fountain again- her counterspell hit the head of the handsome wizard, which was blown off and landed twenty feet away, gouging long scratches into the wooden floor.  
"Never used an Unforgivable Curse before, have you, boy?" she yelled. She had abandoned her baby voice now. "You need to mean them Potter! You need to really want to cause pain- to enjoy it- righteous anger won't hurt me for long- I'll show you how it's done, shall I? I'll give you a lesson-" *  
  
"BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BE-" Hermione groaned. 'Damn alarm clock' she thought. Though in truth, she was almost glad, she didn't want to see the Cruciatus Curse used again. 'Wait a minute..' Hermione remembered that Harry used the Cruciatus Curse on Bellatrix Lestrange. "He could be put in Azkaban for LIFE if anyone found out!" "If anyone found out what dear?" Hermione jumped. "MOM!!! DON'T DO THAT!!!" Hermione's mother stepped away from the door. "I'm sorry! Anyway, please come down and eat something, you look rather pale." "Okay Mom, I'll be down in a few minutes." Hermione replied, and closed her door.  
Looking down at her wrist to check the time, she realized that she'd forgotten to heal herself. Sighing, Hermione was silently grateful that her mother had interrupted her, otherwise, she would have noticed her wrist at breakfast, and would just further arouse her parent's suspicions. Hermione healed herself quickly and changed haphazardly into a black shirt and jeans. She quickly brushed her hair so she wouldn't have to put up with remarks about how messy she was, and tied it back to get it out of her way. Hermione walked out of the room, carefully closing the door behind her, and headed downstairs without looking in her mirror. She didn't really feel the need to see how awful she looked, and would only so that if anyone complained.  
As she walked down the stairs, Hermione didn't notice a magazine that her mother had dropped on the way down. Thus she slipped, and finished her trek by gracefully falling down the last six steps and landing flat on her face. Brought out of that oblivion she now preferred to be in, she swore loudly, and her mother, in the kitchen a few feet away, got an English lesson.  
"HERMIONE GRANGER!!!" Her she scolded, "YOU ARE LUCKY YOUR FATHER ALREADY LEFT FOR WORK!!!" Hermione sighed, "Yes Mom, sorry." Instead of making her angry, like it would to most people, this just depressed her. Though bringing her back to the real world annoyed her for a second, the feeling that she couldn't do anything right took over.  
After dropping the bowl, which luckily didn't break, stabbing herself with a spoon (A.N. it's possible, and it hurts!), having to use the bad cereal, and spilling the milk, Hermione decided that today was not a good day to be practicing her spells or doing any other homework. So she told her mom that she wasn't feeling well to get rid of the nagging, crawled back into her bed, and fell asleep. (A.N. when you're depressed, you can sleep a lot.) 


	4. Change

My Blood's True Color  
  
Chapter Three ~ Change  
  
* For a few seconds Voldemort was visible only as a dark, rippling, faceless figure, shimmering and indistinct upon the plinth, clearly struggling to throw off the suffocating mass-  
Then he was gone, and the water fell with a crash back into its pool, slopping wildly over the sides, drenching the polished floor.  
"MASTER!" screamed Bellatrix.  
Sure it was over, sure Voldemort had decided to flee, Harry made to run out from behind his statue guard, but Dumbledore bellowed, "Stay where you are, Harry!"  
For the first time, Dumbledore sounded frightened. Harry could not see why. The hall was quite empty but for themselves, the sobbing Bellatrix still trapped under her statue, and the tiny baby Fawkes croaking feebly on the floor-  
And then Harry's scar burst open. He knew he was dead: it was pain beyond imagining, pain past endurance-  
He was gone from the hall, he was locked in the coils of a creature with red eyes, so tightly bound that Harry did not know where his body ended and the creature's began. They were fused together, bound by pain, and there was no escape-  
"Kill me now Dumbledore.."  
Blinded and dying, every part of him screaming for release, Harry felt the creature use him again..  
"If death is nothing, Dumbledore, kill the boy."  
Let the pain stop, thought Harry. Let him kill us.. End it, Dumbledore.. Death is nothing compared to this.. *  
  
Hermione woke up. She was out of breath and sweating, her chest was heaving and her hands were cold and numb. Sat up swiftly and her head pounded, the room spun around her, and she fell upwards to land back on her bed.  
'I can't believe it' she thought as she waited to regain her senses. 'I felt all of that, I did want to die. It just hurt too much..' Hermione hoisted herself up slowly, and the spinning vertigo returned. Falling back on the bed, she felt contaminated, like she had somehow fouled her body. Like there was disease swimming through her veins. Whatever had bound Harry seemed to have bound her, and left behind something dirty. She got up again, and this time she was able to stay up. Pushing off the covers, Hermione once again crossed the floor to her bathroom.  
She looked for the metal, and caught sight of her reflection. She jumped back, horrified, as her reflection stared back at her. The thing had empty, slit, black eyes sunken into hollows that surrounded it. The skin was almost completely white, and there were red and black streaks that looked like they were dripping down the sides of her face from the outer corners of her eyes. The lips were blood red and surrounded perfect, gleaming, white teeth, the canines long and pointed. The hollow of her neck had blood dripping down, staining a torn and tattered satin black dress, which Hermione had never seen before. The figure looked almost like an hourglass, and the white skin continued down the rest of the body. Fingers were long and tapered, nails perfectly manicured, yet sharp to touch. As for the hair, it was long, thick, shining, not at all bushy, and raven black. It reached the waist of its owner and was wavy, light reflecting off it and casting shadows along the back of the person. It took only a few moments for Hermione to come out of her shock. Studying the image closely, she didn't see any resemblance to herself, and came to the conclusion that she had unknowingly cast a spell on the mirror, but as she reached out to get her wand from the counter, she saw the same long, tapered fingers, with the same pale skin. Shaking, she reached up to get her hair, and as she brought it in front of her face, she saw black, not brown. Not believing this, she noticed the black dress on her arm, the torn ends brushing the floor and almost covering her feet. Hermione looked back to the mirror, and stared at what had become of her. She smiled, and thought of the look on her mothers face at this change. Hermione almost burst into laughter at the look on Ron and Harry's faces when THEY saw her. Returning her thoughts to herself, she realized that except for the hollows around her eyes, she looked much better. Though she had the blood dripping from her throat, Hermione noticed that it wasn't really dripping, it just looked like it was, it was really just a pattern of the veins underneath her skin, that shimmered as if there was really blood on her skin, and the blood flow was still existent, just going through veins, and not really staining her dress. As for the flow from her eyes, it looked like it was just dripping makeup, and it even looked good anyways. Deciding not to cut herself at the moment, Hermione went out to surprise her mother. Then she suddenly stopped in the middle of her room, and turned. She saw a face outside her window, looking in at her. Her dream came rushing back to her, and she fainted as she remembered what happened, which somehow had to do with the person staring in at her. 


	5. Stupid

My Blood's True Color  
  
Chapter Four ~ Stupid  
  
* Dumbledore got to his feet and walked past Harry to the black cabinet that stood beside Fawkes's perch. He bent down, slid back a catch, and took from inside it the shallow stone basin, carved with runes around the edges, in which Harry had seen his father tormenting Snape. Dumbledore walked back to the desk, placed the Pensieve upon it, and raised his wand to his own temple. From it, he withdrew silvery, gossamer-fine strands of thought clinging to the wand, and deposited them in the basin. He sat back down behind his desk and watched his thoughts swirl and drift inside the Pensieve for a moment. Then, with a sigh, he raised his wand and prodded the silvery substance with its tip.  
A figure rose out of it, draped in shawls, her eyes magnified to enormous size behind her glasses, and she revolved slowly, her feet in the basin. But when Sibyll Trelawney spoke, it was not in her usual ethereal, mystic voice, but in the harsh, hoarse tones Harry had heard her use once before.  
"THE ONE WITH THE POWER TO VANQUISH THE DARK LORD APPROACHES.. BORN TO THOSE WHO HAVE THRICE DEFIED HIM, BORN AS THE SEVENTH MONTH DIES. AND THE DARK LORD WILL MARK HIM AS HIS EQUAL, BUT HE WILL HAVE POWER THE DARK LORD KNOWS NOT. AND EITHER MUST DIE AT THE HAND OF THE OTHER FOR NEITHER CAN LIVE WHILE THE OTHER SURVIVES.. THE ONE WITH THE POWER TO VANQUISH THE DARK LORD WILL BE BORN AS THE SEVENTH MONTH DIES.."  
The slowly revolving Professor Trelawney sank back into the silver mass below and vanished. *  
  
"Who do you think she is?" "I'm not sure, but why is she in Hermione's house?" "This is bad, what if she's captured!" "Harry! Calm down! This is probably just her cousin or something!" Wait, look Ron, I think she's waking up."  
Hermione moaned and rubbed her head, but as she tried to sit up, someone shoved her back down. Hermione opened her eyes and gasped. "Harry! Ron! What are you guys doing here?" She was answered with a wand pointed at her while Harry menacingly said "Well, shouldn't you be answering that to us?" Hermione gulped, 'Why are they looking at me like that? Don't they recognize me?' "Well?" He prodded her with the wand. "Aren't you going to answer me?" Hermione regained her composure and stood up, despite Harry and Ron's attempts to keep her on the floor. "You guys truly don't recognize me?" She asked, dumbfounded. "Of course we don't!" snapped Ron. "We've never seen you before in our life!" About to retaliate, Hermione suddenly stopped, and in the mirror across the room. If she could have, without being hexed, Hermione would have slapped herself. She had completely forgotten that she looked different now. 'No wonder they're so suspicious!' Hermione shook her head and decided on telling her friends what had happened instead of teasing them.  
"I'm sorry, Harry, Ron." She began. "Wait a minute," Ron interrupted again. "How do you know who we are?" Hermione sighed. "Well, I was about to say before you so rudely interrupted" she countered. Ron mumbled under his breath but didn't say anything more, so Hermione continued. "I woke up like this today, and I don't think that either one of you would have appreciated that either. Especially when your two best friends decide to show up before you can figure out why, and think that you're some evil person sent by Voldemort to kill someone!" She paused, to see if this got through to something, but she was still getting confused looks from Harry and Ron. If they hadn't been accusing her of something, she would have laughed at them, they were just that clueless. Hermione decided that rolling her eyes at them would suffice before they got it, and started speaking again. "Let's see, you visit my home, accuse me of being someone else, and you STILL can't figure out who I am!" This caused Ron's ears to turn red and Harry to turn on her with a look of disbelief. He stared for a moment before saying "Hermione?" She just laughed and said, "Good going Einstein, now can you tell me what two plus two is?" Ron had caught on by now and was also staring at her as if she had something along the lines of two heads. "Hermione?" Harry repeated. "Yes it's me." Hermione replied, getting a little annoyed at how slow he was. "But. How?" Ron asked. Hermione was now kind of annoyed at their stupidity. "If you guys had been listening to me, then maybe you would have heard me say that I have NO CLUE why I look like this!" She said in an aggravated tone. "But Hermione," Harry whispered. "Don't you know who you look like?" Ron realized what Harry was saying, and looked horrified. Hermione, on the other hand, didn't know what he was talking about. "Noooooo." She said briskly. "I don't know who I look like." "Hermione," He started. "You look like Voldemort." 


	6. Truth

My Blood's True Color  
  
Chapter 5 ~ 'It Is True Then.  
  
~ "Yes, you've found out." The figure hissed menacingly. "You know who you are now, and it disgusts me that you had to be told by such scum as that boy." Pale, spidery hands melted out of the shadows that concealed the figure, an ancient, leather-bound book balanced between them. "This is to help you find what you really are, my dear." He breathed, and inched toward the light. "You will find where your loyalties truly lie." The figure then came into the full view of it's spectator, his red eyes glaring. The girl before him screamed, and collapsed. ~  
  
The echoes of her scream still lingering, Hermione Granger woke up, covered in sweat and panting. She sat up, and felt a heavy object slide off the bed and land on the floor with a muffled bang. Looking to see what the object was, Hermione almost screamed again. It was the leather-bound book from her dream. "NO. It can't be, I can't be." She whispered. "Harry and Ron. they were wrong, they WERE!" She cried. Forgetting about being heard, Hermione broke down into tears. "I'm not that. I can't be that. It's not true!" Crying this to herself over and over, Hermione didn't notice the company she'd gained until she felt a hand around her waist. "Shhh, Hermione, it's okay." Mrs. Granger whispered. "Everything's going to be fine in the morning." Comforted just by her mothers presence, Hermione quieted, and turned around to hug her mother. "Thank you, Mum." She sniffed. "Shhh, just be still, you'll be fine in the morning." Her mother replied, and left, after kissing Hermione on the forehead and smoothing back her hair. "Goodnight honey." She whispered as she left the room. "Goodnight Mum." Hermione breathed, and lay back against her pillow. ' "Everything will be okay in the morning." Yeah right!' Scoffed a voice at the back of her head as she dropped back to sleep. Hermione's conscious barely noticed it, but it still did. 'It is true then. I am becoming that.' Was her last thought before she slipped back into the darkness. 


End file.
